I grew into the woods, a silent form among the trees. I belonged there, so straight and still.
I threw my love into a million pieces. I gave it away. And my heart cried for them back, as the struggle spoke of the difficulty of finding love returned. For, they killed me with it, dearest. My heart frozen into shards and sent burrowing back into my veins. They killed me with my love.

The wind in my winter found my face. Bitterness and burnt cheeks from kissing Requiem. How my love burned inside my body, like icy waters lapping at my sternum and burrowing into my eyelids while sleep availed me.
And so I stood on that embankment of my soul, a harrowed ship in a grey sea. And I closed my eyes to my despair to breathe in my future, but the salt burned my lungs.
Perhaps that is the price of soul, to burn with such intensity. To feel lit up in a room of black particles, landing on your shoulders like ash.
Burn Burn Burn.
Oh light of love.
Red poppy rise from the ashes.

That crispness in the air, the bite of the wind, the scent of wood burning off the chill.

I sit in front of the stove, pushing the stubborn logs into the mouth of the flame, and think of you. I think about these walls, how we built them together. How we laid and stained the trim. How we cut and nailed boards together. I think of how resilient it is, the caressing warmth from the hearth. It does not escape, it doesn’t leave as you do.

Mostly, I remember. I remember some closeness, some strange endeavor of the heart. Walking in that cold wind, the snow drifting and filling, measuring time like delicate frozen grains of sand in the world that was just ours. So far from everything, from our beds and our lies. It seemed more real somehow. More real than those sweltering summer days that followed.

But you’re gone now. Perhaps that’s for the best. Perhaps it was all just a fantasy. A world of snow trapped in a globe. Perhaps I will find something more real than you. More real than my thoughts of you. You pace. You walk away with a whistle on your lips, singing some song that I can’t hear, or don’t recognize.